BIRGITTE LYKKE MADSEN, HORIZONS AND REFLECTIONS

Three years later, the Pirra Art Gallery is pleased to host again the painter Birgitte Lykke Madsen. Born in 1960 in Odense, where she attended the Academy of Fine Arts from 1981 to 1986 and where she currently lives and works, Lykke Madsen has directed her pictorial research towards specific interests, even technical, that took shape into a very particular theme: the relationship between man and water. Attracted by the evocative power of colors and fascinated by the influence of the space on the bodies, she found in the aquatic environment the perfect way to communicate with the spectator. The artist herself sums up her original point of view: "Painting water sets me free of any limitation concerning room and reality, both in the use of colors as in the depiction”. In this sense, the most significant works are those in which the subject, usually a woman, is represented under water: her body has just "broken" the surface and the column of foam is still white, or she is swimming towards the light. The color of the water, the tension between the body and what surrounds it, as well as the symbolic connotations of the subject are combined into a powerful sensory and intellectual experience. Beside the works that explore the "secret life" under the surface, there are those that depict the "public" and “social” dimension of water, the one of the horizons and reflections that give the title to the exhibition: lively beaches on low water, young boys chatting in the blue sea and sky, isolated swimmers seen from above, a woman walking absorbed on the shoreline, and the boats almost suspended in the immensity between the sky and the sea, with a fleeting horizon. In fact, horizons and reflections are the only, faint, references of space and time that the artist put in her works, creating a sort of new and cozy atmosphere. As in a mist of memories, Lykke Madsen’s paintings dreamly live in a timeless dimension where we are warmly welcome.